Highways and Goat Tracks: The Challenge of Change
Daniel Murray
Transforming Business Culture with Empathy | Keynote Speaker, Empathy Expert & CEO at Empathic Consulting
Welcome to the 61st edition of the Leading with Empathy Newsletter. Isn't the year flying by!!!
With the wonder of the Olympics still burning in my imagination, I thought it might be worth discussing how changing minds work, why it is hard and what we can do to overcome the strain. Also, some of my wonderful clients get a shout out and plenty of regional travel coming so check out the diary and let me know if I can support you on my travels.
Highways and goat tracks
It was late December a few years ago now when I found myself staring in horror at the sight in front of me. Soft, flabby and weak were the words that came to mind, I felt sick. The mirror in front of me didn't hold back, there was no distortion or ambiguity. I was out of shape and overweight. After my years of cycling and playing football had been scaled back through running a business, raising a daughter and travelling the world speaking, my body had suffered. Full of embarrassment and frustration, I vowed that the next year would be different. I would start getting up early again and exercising. I’d quit drinking and eat healthy food. No more beers and burgers, which had become almost a staple diet, it was time for change.
Fast forward to a March of the next year and I found myself looking up to see my reflection in a window at a local pub. With a burger in one hand and a pint in the other, I remembered the moment from December and realised my best intentions had failed to create any change. Despite how good the burger tasted, I felt a pang of disappointment that I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing. Has this happened to you?. Research on New Year’s Resolutions found that while around 40% of people set themselves a promise each cycle of the calendar, only around 8% of people actually achieve their goals. Like me, the vast majority fall back into the same old habits and behaviours that we hoped to change.
The problem is not your personality or will power, but instead the limitations of the human brain to change through neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's ability to reorganise itself by forming and strengthening different neural connections. This adaptive feature of the brain is crucial for learning, developing new skills and storing memories. Everything we think along with most of the actions we perform are controlled by the firing of these neural pathways in our brain. Changing our habits, beliefs and mental models depends on this neuroplasticity to help us restructure old pathways while forming and strengthening new ones.
When a certain pathway is fired often the connections between the neurons, known as synapses, are strengthened. These well used pathways become akin to four-lane highways in our brains. This reorganising is useful as it reduces the distance between neurons which also requires less effort to fire making the brain more energy efficient. How amazing is that? Your brain is a self-organising machine focused on using less power. These highways become our defaults and like the social groups reinforcing beliefs, the more we fire a pathway, the stronger and more efficient it becomes.
However, while neuroplasticity enables reorganisation, change and adaptation, it also explains why humans often find it difficult to change our habits and opinions. Repeated activation is the key to strengthening pathways and creating deeply ingrained neural networks that are optimised for those specific actions or thoughts. This means that breaking a habit requires the slow and often challenging process of weakening old connections and forming new ones. New ideas, actions and habits are also neural pathways within the brain, but due to the lack of firing, these are not like the four-lane highways of our existing pathways. Instead, a new idea is more like a rough little goat track up the side of a hill.
In a moment of stress, pressure or tiredness, the brain is faced with a choice of using the old established mental highway or taking the more new goat track. What we know is that the brain, particularly under stress, tends to prefer the more energy efficient highways. This resistance to the new way is often compounded by cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, where people favour information that confirms their preexisting beliefs and ignore or rationalise disconfirming evidence. The brain almost takes the old pathway automatically then, often when we realise, justify that decision to reduce any cognitive dissonance.
Imagine this scenario. While eating my breakfast on Sunday morning I feel tired and unhealthy so I make a decision to improve my diet. I pack myself a healthy lunch on Monday, but have back to back meetings all day and am feeling run down. Tuesday morning I forgot to pack a healthy lunch and by mid afternoon am feeling hungry. I need a pick-me-up so I grab a burrito from the takeaway downstairs. In my mind, I justify that it isn’t because I don’t want to be healthy, I just was busy today. The next day is busy too and by Friday when someone in my team invites me to join them for dinner after work, I convince myself that I deserve it. By the next Sunday, which pathway has been strengthened, the healthy goat track or the highway to burrito town?
Neuroplasticity provides the brain with remarkable adaptability, but the way it reinforces behaviours contributes to the difficulty of changing established pathways. Overcoming old highways requires considerable effort and persistence. We must persistently take the goat tracks. We need to overcome our instincts and allow the pathway for the new idea, behaviour or habit to be fired over and over again. Philippa Lally and her team at University College London found that on average, it takes about 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic. While this varies a lot for individuals, the main point is simple: making a change will take persistent effort over an extended period of time. Be persistent in your self-awareness and patient with your regular slips back into old ways. You are only human after all, like the rest of us.
Trimming the overhanging branches
In our small garden, we have three mature olive trees against the fence with our neighbours. Previously, the neighbour had large palm trees that shadowed these trees from the afternoon sun, but since he removed these palms, the olive trees have gone wild. Their branches are now seeming to reach over the top of the fence, eager to grab all the afternoon sunshine they can. So, what should be done?
Let’s explore three options:
While the choice might seem obvious when it comes to the offending olive branches, we seem to not see it as clearly when it comes to the cognitive branches and beliefs in our minds and in the minds of others. As a gardener, I must tend to my garden. Blaming it on the neighbour or throwing away everything isn’t often the answer. If someone’s belief doesn’t fit with my own, I shouldn’t immediately agree with them, nor feel the need to try to make them change to fit with my view. If I find there is a problem in my beliefs, I can change them. These are my trees, the impetus to change sits with me.
The second option again seems extreme for the olive trees, pulling them from the ground. But this is also how people sometimes see the threat of trimming their ideas. Any challenge to my beliefs could be fatal. People think: if we give an inch here, I might lose the whole thing. This is common in some religious dogma where desperate attempts are made to explicitly justify every single element as fact for fear that it will reduce the validity of the whole. Did Noah really collect a breeding pair of every animal, put them in a large wooden boat and keep them fed for five months? This story doesn’t need to be factually true for the ideas to be valid. Noah’s Ark is a story of divine punishment for those with moral decay and how faithful obedience and service can be the path to salvation. Whether you agree or disagree with the underlying moral of the story is a different matter. But trying to convince me that the lions, tigers and hyenas didn’t eat all the chickens, cows and sheep for five months doesn’t strengthen the moral argument in my eyes.
The answer to my olive branch problem is obvious. You don’t need to pull the whole tree out, just trim the branches. Cut back the offending bits and support the beautiful trees in their ongoing growth. The same should be the case for our ideas, heuristics and beliefs. We should be clear on our moral foundations, our values and the elements we feel are the core of our decision making. But as the world changes around us, don’t expect others to change to make our new ideas valid. Don’t tell them to change or make them agree. Also, don’t think that a challenge to a small part means you have to throw the whole thing out. No, you can and must trim the branches too.
At times, even when we know it deep down, it can be difficult to trim the branches. Admitting we were wrong is hard and is further exacerbated by the social and emotional implications. Being wrong can feel like a personal failure, which can be threatening to our self-esteem and social standing. This is particularly the case in environments and cultures where the pressure is high and certainty and expertise is seen as critical. Frequently we see case studies from the worlds of healthcare, heavy industry, politics and business that highlight the folly of holding fast onto bad ideas. In these places, admitting wrongness can be seen as a sign of weakness or incompetence.
Take Anatoly Dyatlov. After graduating with honours from the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute, he worked installing nuclear reactors into submarines. He rose through the ranks of the USSR’s nuclear program, fuelled by deep expertise, sharp intellect and a commitment to his work that was noticed by all around him. Dyatlov became the Deputy Chief Engineer of the Chernobyl power plant and oversaw the construction of three reactors that at their peak powered a significant portion of Ukraine. He also played an important role in the development of the safety protocols to protect workers and ensure the safe operation of the facility.
Dyatlov was a demanding manager, intimidating to his subordinates and autocratic in his leadership style. On the 26th of April 1986, his insistence on proceeding with dangerous testing despite concerns from his team played a significant role in the Chernobyl reactor meltdown. While many factors contributed to this disaster, Dyatlov having more expertise wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy. Had he listened to his team or paid more attention to the operational risks, maybe it would have never happened. It is possible that the pressures on Dyatlov from above played a big factor and that the leaders who he reported to in his earlier career contributed to the making of the man.
Ultimately, a disaster like this can scarcely be blamed on one man. However, Dyatlov’s management style certainly did little to mitigate the impact. His colleague and fellow veteran of the USSR’s nuclear program, Vadym Vasylyovych Hryshchenko, summed up the leadership style of Dyatlov:
“While working at the Chernobyl NPP, Alexander Stepanovych remained the same Dyatlov I knew at the shipyard. He deeply, as they say, knew the equipment of the station, was tireless in his work, and paid a lot of attention to self-education. He did not change his principles of communicating with people. It must be admitted that in this respect he had certain problems, upon first meeting one got the impression that he was a sullen, dissatisfied man. During further communication, it became clear that he is cheerful, likes and knows how to joke, and is a good conversationalist. He always had his own point of view and never changed it at the request of the boss, he persuaded, did not agree, in the end, obeyed, but remained with his opinion. Similarly, he had little regard for the opinion of his subordinates. Of course, not everyone likes such a person.”
Can you think of someone with these traits? They are not all that uncommon. The ability to admit when we are wrong is crucial for personal growth and learning. It allows us to update our knowledge and adapt to new information, which is essential in an ever-changing world. Acknowledging our mistakes opens us up to new perspectives and deepens our understanding of the world.
It also plays a vital role in maintaining and strengthening relationships. Building trust is a fundamental component of leading with empathy and when individuals can’t seem to openly admit their mistakes, trust is eroded. We must be humble and admit that some of our ideas are wrong without fear of judgement or reprisal. This will encourage more open communication and foster a culture of updating ideas around us.
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Building a culture of branch trimming is beneficial to ourselves and the relationships we hold allowing for more open and collaborative environments to flourish. Fostering an environment that encourages admitting wrongness can lead to more robust decision-making processes and innovation. In our modern, complex and volatile world, we need groups of people that embrace this principle fully. You and your team will be constantly bombarded with new information and changing circumstances, trimming the ideological branches will be vital for sustainability and growth.
Ultimately, becoming better at admitting we are wrong is not just about correcting individual mistakes; it's about cultivating a culture of curiosity, openness, and resilience. Embracing our fallibility with humility can reduce conflicts, enhance decision-making, and promote a more compassionate and understanding society. It encourages us all to remain learners—humble and wise in the recognition that knowledge is vast, and our grasp of it is always incomplete.
So great working with education professionals!
Recently I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of amazing people, particularly those who dedicate their lives to educating our children. Speaking at conferences for the:
Plus a bunch of school interested in sessions for their staff in the near future!
It is a pleasure and an honour to serve these amazing people. If you have a child at school, please support the teachers, support staff, cleaners, business managers, principals and all the other great people who enrich the lives of young people under some pretty challenging circumstances.
If you have read this far, can I suggest you grab a few Thank You cards and write a small note for someone at a school. It might just change their whole year...
On the road again...
Plenty of travel in the coming months, so if you are looking for some support and I'll be in your area please get in touch. Here are some possible days interstate that might line up with you and save everyone on the travel expenses:
Some cracking podcast guests!
As many will know, the Leading with Empathy Podcast is building quite a library of guests and I'm really enjoying the opportunity to speak to some wonderful people. My recent guests have been some of the most generous and open people, highly recommend checking them out:
Thanks again for reading, I really appreciate all the support from so many generous people!
Reach out and say hello if you have the time, I always enjoy a message...
Regards
Daniel